


Things Past

by MlleMusketeer



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Bad Decisions, Body Horror, Dubious Consent, Horror, Imprisonment, M/M, Mind Invasion, Mutilation, Possession, Robogore, The Matrix is a jerk, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-30 09:22:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5158556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MlleMusketeer/pseuds/MlleMusketeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Megatron discovers the difference between Optimus Prime and Orion Pax. Megatron sets out to repair this difference. </p><p>And finds that he's picked a fight even he cannot win. </p><p>A late Halloween fic. Warning: there will be no happy ending here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Optimus didn’t plead, one of the few things Megatron could admit to approval of in his long time enemy. It didn’t mean Optimus wasn’t distressed—he could read that in the flare of Optimus’s optics and the way his hands clenched helplessly under the restraints—and Megatron grinned with vicious satisfaction. He raised the connector, held between forefinger and thumb. Optimus’s wide blue optics went even wider, and Megatron didn’t need to see under the battlemask to imagine his foe’s grimace. 

“A cortical psychic patch, Optimus,” he said, unnecessarily. Optimus had certainly recognized it. “I will have the location of the Autobot base, and I will have it from _you_ , Optimus. It will be your failure that dooms your people.”

“I will resist you however I can, Megatron,” said Optimus, steady and even, and for a moment, Megatron hated him for it. What use was pretension here? Snarled hatred he could respect, but such a statement, as if futile resistance would somehow absolve Optimus of his failure, of _everything…_

“It will do you no good.” He jammed the connector into the port on the back of Optimus’s neck. Optimus jerked and went limp. Megatron bared his dentae, victorious, and dove into the Autobot’s mind. 

Megatron looked around him, snorted. They were in the Iacon Hall of Records. “How predictable, Optimus,” he said aloud. “But you forget that you showed me the paths through these archives yourself.” He began to walk, knowing the data he sought lay directly ahead of him. 

He almost expected to see the ghosts of their past skitter and flit around him. There was the table they spent so many hours at, studying the data Orion had uncovered. There was the shelf Orion had attempted to climb, with near disastrous results. There was the place he had first taken Orion, up against the wall. They would have been caught had it not been so late; Orion had made quite a lot of noise, valve wet and hot, bucking back with artless enthusiasm. He could have put Starscream to shame, that night, and Megatronus had been scarcely quieter, elated with claiming his dearest follower in the heart of Iacon’s dignified opulence. 

Something caught his optic then, a flicker of blue light ahead. Megatron started forward. A small atrium lay ahead. He had taught Orion how to defend himself there, millennia ago, when they had the same enemies. 

Between that step and the next, he realized that something followed him. It wasn’t a sound, just the brush of a presence along his plating, the sense of something there. He didn’t even dignify it with turning around; whatever lurked here had no power over him. He simply sneered, and kept walking, weapons systems insultingly offline. There was the atrium, just ahead, and he stepped out into the open space.

And stopped, revulsion dropping into his tank and settling there. 

In the center of the room stood the source of the blue light, a preservation case, a far larger version of the cases he used on the Nemesis to store the Iacon Relics. Mech sized, in fact, and in it floated a familiar figure.

Helm tilted back, arms outflung, as if some great hand had seized him by the sparkchamber and yanked him off his pedes, Orion Pax hung with the blue light playing over his frame and turning his paint strange pale shades of silver, like a dead thing. His sparkchamber was wide open, his mouth slack, his optics wide but offline, and he rotated, like some trophy. 

Megatron snarled and lunged forward, swiped at the case, knowing it would do no good… and came up short with a startled pant as his claws screeched over solid transparisteel. Orion did not stir. 

“He only slumbers,” said a voice behind him, and Megatron whirled, cannon onlining. 

Optimus Prime stepped out of the shadows, mask raised, blasters retracted. He seemed bigger here, bigger even than Megatron. Megatron bared his dentae in challenge. “What is the meaning of this?”

“He only slumbers,” said Optimus again. He moved forward again. Megatron braced himself, but Optimus stepped through him, laid a hand against the case that imprisoned Orion. 

“Who are you?” snarled Megatron. 

Optimus looked down at him, with that calm, knowing gaze. “I am the Matrix of Leadership,” he said. “I am Optimus Prime.”

“And what of Orion Pax?” 

“Orion Pax slumbers,” said the Matrix. “He has no place here.”

The beginnings of comprehension bubbled up, and Megatron muscled back the building rage as he hadn’t needed to since Orion betrayed him on the floor of the Council. He used his anger; it did not use him. But this was a rage that threatened to ride him, vicious and beyond reason, the betrayal made fresh and stronger for its age. 

“That is Orion Pax?” he asked, drawing a claw down the glass, and adding another when the Matrix looked irritated. “He slumbers, and has no say here? No control over his own frame?”

“He slumbers,” said the Matrix, “because I have no use for him. This is my frame, not his.He has served me well, given me a personality to pattern myself from. He was a good choice; he makes a good Prime.”

“He does not,” said Megatron. “You are not him.” 

“I am not him,” said the Matrix. “But I could not be Optimus Prime without him.”

“How long?” said Megatron. He drew away from the case. 

“Since he received me,” said the Matrix. “He was too gentle for war. I kept him safe. He woke, briefly, after Unicron.”

“I know that,” said Megatron, and the rage broke. “But no more!”

He struck the case, the only thing he could, he blasted it. The Matrix watched, uncaring, as he vented his full rage upon it, and somehow it remained unscathed. “Have you always done this?” he roared, turning on the Matrix, at the thing that spoke with Orion’s voice, moved with his movements, had stolen Orion and twisted him to its own purposes. “Every Prime, has it always been you?”

“Not always,” said the Matrix. “But it is simply how things ought to be.”

“No,” said Megatron. “It is not. You are not needed, Matrix of Leadership. You never were!” _Orion you fool_ , something in him cried, _you fool, to accept and be so overcome! I could have resisted, if you hadn’t betrayed me for this slavery!_ “You are only one more mark of the corruption of the Primes of old!”

“I am needed,” said the Matrix. “Orion made his sacrifice. Optimus Prime is needed, and Orion need know nothing of it.”

“Orion has the right to know of it!” Megatron’s claws flexed. He drew himself upright, optics on Orion’s still form rotating in blue silence. Was that pain on the faceplates, in the reflection of light from dead optics? Within his chest, his spark pulsed. Megatron had seen Orion open many times, frame and spark alike, and only this time did it seem obscene. 

He recalled the moments he had spent under Unicron’s thrall, the pain, the horror of it, the humiliation. It woke him out of recharge, when in memory purges he felt his limbs move without his will, and with it came—not fear, but a revulsion much like this. 

“I see now,” he said aloud. “The Matrix or dark energon, Primus or Unicron, there is no difference. We are all of us pawns.” He met the Matrix’s stolen optics with bared dentae. “But no more. No one uses me as a pawn. No one uses _Cybertronians_ as pawns.”

The Matrix stepped back from his wrath, and confusion marred its noble brow. “You need us.”

“We do not need _gods!”_ roared Megatron, calmed himself, smiled, and said, “But you need us, do you not?”

He terminated the connection. 

He staggered when he returned to his own frame, turned it into a lunge forward, came to a halt next to Optimus. He stared at the windshields for a moment, wrenched them apart and out of the way, relishing the way glass crackled and yielded under his claws. “Knockout, a saw. _NOW!_ ”

Knockout showed no comprehension, but put a saw in Megatron’s reaching hand anyway. Megatron slapped Optimus across the faceplates, hard. “Why hasn’t he rebooted?”

“Possibly because the traumatic manner of the…” Knockout started, his usual insolent drawl, then bolted to attention as Megatron’s furious gaze landed on him. “He should in moments, my lord!”

Megatron snarled, turned his attention back to Optimus. One vent. Two. Optimus’s optics flickered to life. 

“Good,” said Megatron. “I want you to be conscious for this. I want you to feel this, _Optimus Prime_. I want you to know your death, and it will be your death.”

Optimus stared up at him, and Megatron activated the saw. 

He was no medic, but he’d torn apart enough mecha to know his way around a frame. The first stroke of the saw laid Optimus open from neck to abdomen, and Megatron tossed aside the saw, jammed claws into the wound and _wrenched._

Optimus convulsed around him, a gasp turned into a shriek. Energon splattered, Megatron snarled, putting his full strength against the hinges of Optimus’s chest. Optimus screamed, and kept screaming, sounds that Megatron had never heard from him before, and delighted in.

The hinges didn’t give. Neither did the seals around his chestplates; the locks there held firm under the influence of the Matrix. So firmly that it was the tissues above and below them that ripped away, baring spark assembly and fuel systems alike. Megatron tasted energon, licked it away, laughed, and Optimus’s screams grew higher, the high grating wail of dying machinery. 

There was the Matrix. Megatron wrapped his claws around it and wrenched, wrenched again as Optimus bucked and shrieked. His pedes rattled against the berth, battlemask snapped back, energon bubbling from his intake. Megatron set himself as he had in the Pits— _remember him looking at you remember the mixed horror and admiration_ —lines and servos screaming, and threw himself backwards.

The Matrix released all at once, sending him backward against another berth. On the slab, Optimus shuddered convulsively. Megatron threw the Matrix against the wall. He would finish the job later. 

He went to the slab, wiped the energon away from Optimus’s mouth. Wide blue optics met his, uncomprehending with pain. No more screams, just the staring, and Optimus’s mouth moved, formed a word. 

“Megatronus?”

Megatron smoothed a hand over Optimus’s helm. “I am here,” he said. “Knockout! Repair him. If he offlines, it’s your spark.”

“Repair him?” Knockout staggered forward. “But you…”

“REPAIR HIM!”

“Yes, my lord.”

Megatron turned his attention back to Orion. “You’re free,” he said, cupping his helm and wondering at how small it seemed in his hand. “You’re free. The Autobots cannot hurt you any more. Never again.” Out of the corner of his optic, he saw Knockout making the preparations to slip Orion into stasis. “Just sleep, Orion. I will be here when you online.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

He tried to destroy the Matrix.

He blasted it. He slashed at it. He even went as far as to jump up and down on it. He toyed with the idea of ejecting it into the system’s sun, but getting close enough to the sun to do that would betoo close for reliable escape. So he mounted it in a protective case, as it had kept Orion for so many million years, and turned his attention to Orion himself. 

When Orion opened his optics again, they were red. Megatron would have punished Knockout for taking such liberties, but there was no more of the Matrix in Orion’s gaze, and for that he was glad. Knockout had also renewed Orion’s brands, and given him proper claws, . 

Orion scratched people with them, when he didn’t mean to, and only seemed to be making a valiant effort to adapt to them. He insisted that he was proud to be a Decepticon, and he would learn to use them properly. None of that stopped him from apologizing profusely when he did injure someone. 

He remembered little of his long captivity. He hardly remembered the pain he’d woken in. He did remember that Megatron had comforted him, and stayed close by his side for weeks, quietly refusing to leave. The Orion Pax who had woken after Unicron’s defeat had been bold by comparison. It concerned Megatron, and he assured Orion that the Autobots were no longer a threat.

For a long time, they recharged together, but nothing more. 

This time, Megatron did not keep Optimus Prime a secret. This time, he did tell Orion what had happened, that the Matrix contained a program that turned him into a mindless slave of the Council’s, that the resulting conflict killed Cybertron. That he had only just learned of this, and freed Orion from it, and he had never realized what the Council had done to him, before. 

He was there when Orion found his weapons again, stared at them in horror. Curled over himself and shook. “How many did I kill?” he demanded, optics shuttered tight. Then, far later, “How did I become this?”

Megatron grew impatient. It was foolish to harbor such regrets; what had been done was done. It was war. Orion had betrayed him, been used as a tool of the Council, but little good regret did for it. 

He hid that impatience. He could not have Orion run back to the Autobots again. He told Orion he had been used. That it hadn’t been him, but the Matrix, and still he woke in the night to find Orion balled up in a corner, hands over his optics, keening softly. 

“My fault,” he whispered, when it was clear he didn’t think Megatron was watching. 

And then, a week later, in his recharge, “I’m missing something.”

The implications of that brought Megatron fully online, and he stared down at his former lover, lying curled on the berth next to him. _I’m missing something_. 

Megatron went down to the vault and stared at the Matrix. It rotated, mute, glinting in the ship’s lights. He bared dentae at it in challenge. “What siren’s song can you weave down here?” he demanded, and the Matrix did not answer.

But the dreams began then. 

In recharge, he would stand there, and it would not be the Matrix within its prison, but Optimus, blue optics and all, smiling at him. Sad. Understanding.

Megatron toyed with the idea of throwing it into the sea, but the possibility of the Autobots getting their hands on it stopped him. 

After a time, Orion seemed to stabilize. He resumed work on the Iacon database, deciphered the last sets of coordinates. The Keys to the Omega Lock, they realized, and Orion turned to him and kissed him full on the intake. 

Megatron bent Orion over his workstation, buried his faceplates in Orion’s valve, then fragged him into shrieking overload. The walk back to their quarters was entirely too long, and the door hardly closed before Orion dropped to his knees before Megatron and kissed his spike cover. 

Orion’s mouth, his glossa, the ripple of his throat tubing—it was still better than he’d remembered. He took Orion by the audials and emptied himself into the small mech’s intake, reveling in the way Orion leaned forward to better submit. 

But in the reset after his overload, the Matrix came to him, still in the frame it had built around Orion, calm, dignified, understanding. It looked at him with blue optics until he snarled defiance at it, and then it spoke.

_Do you think you can hide me behind red optics and claws?_ it asked. _Do you think you defeated me by simply removing me? Oh no. I am far more powerful than that, Megatron. He is still mine._

_My bearer must be full willing. Orion Pax was full willing. Who were you to decide for him?_

“He is no pawn.” Megatron pulled himself awake. 

Next to him, Orion shuddered in his sleep. 

But the Matrix’s voice followed him into waking. _He will be mine until the end of his function_ , it whispered. _Unless I have another._

“No!” snarled Megatron, surging up. “Never again!”

He looked down at Orion and drew him into his arms, curled tight around him, and Orion stilled, pressed against him. “Never again,” he murmured against Orion’s helm. 

There was no response, but if he stayed in contact, Orion did not speak in his sleep, did not flinch from the unheard words of the Matrix. 

The next night, Megatron secreted the thing on Earth, deep in an abandoned mine, locked in a strongbox that once held the treasures of Iaconian nobility.

It made little difference to Orion’s sleep. 

 

* * *

 

The Autobots eluded them. 

The Matrix haunted Orion’s dreams.

Otherwise, all was as it should be. 

But Megatron chafed, enraged that the artifact that enslaved Orion should still hold such sway over him. He chafed, and thought about the Autobots, free and doubtless plotting against their former Prime, and wondered what would happen if one of them by chance found what he had hidden. What would happen if Starscream did.

The Autobots would have a new weapon.

And even Starscream did not deserve the fate the Matrix entailed. 

He thought again of defying Unicron. What further power could Primus’s bauble have than what he had already defied? And so pacified, the thing would leave Orion in peace. 

Perhaps even the Autobots might be inclined to follow a Matrix-bearer, regardless of history.

The first time, he dismissed the idea.

In the dark of the night, when Orion cried out and curled small with the force of his dreams, it was not so easy to dismiss. 

And the next night, it was even harder.

The Matrix itself did not come to him. Perhaps it knew what a delicate balance weighed his decision. 

He remembered thinking that he could have spared Orion this. He remembered it as he gathered the smaller mech close, pulled him out of the guilt the Matrix inflicted. He remembered it as Orion turned his face against his chestplates and trembled with suppressed grief, for what he could never remember. 

_We were supposed to be one people_ , he thought, stroking Orion’s helm to quiet him. _We were always supposed to be one people, and Optimus Prime split us, Optimus Prime and his masters placed us one against the other, one above the other._

_If I had been Prime, I would not have been so erased. I could have stopped this war. I knew it then. I know it now._

_No more shall I stand idle._

He waited for Orion to fall into sleep again. He arranged the bedding close about him, brushed the curve of Orion’s jaw. When he returned, he would have to be always on guard, always at war with himself. It would not be easy. But for Orion, whom he had once abandoned to the most hideous fate imaginable, it was a burden he was willing to bear. 

He went to the flight deck, alien air cold and clean in his vents, and stood there a time, looking up at the stars. 

_Today, we return home,_ he thought. 

He leapt up, the transformation sweet and powerful. 

 

* * *

 

The cave was deep and dim, lit by the blue gleam of energon. Megatron stalked through it alone, navigating the unsettling twilight with the confidence borne of decades of mining. He hated it; a flightframe miner’s life was a special pit of its own. 

At last he came to the chamber that housed the Matrix. At last he prised the box open, and lifted the thing out. He gave it a viscous smile. 

“You want another host?” he said. “Then let us see what you make of _me._ ”

He slid his chestplates apart, his spark blazing with anger and determination, brilliant light flooding the dim caves. He brought the Matrix to it, into himself.

Spinning darkness swept over him. The last Lord Megatron, Emperor of Destruction, the Terror of Kaon, felt was the locks engaging. 

After a moment, Megatron Prime rose, and looked down at his frame with considering optics. 

 


End file.
